Category: Microsoft

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Life in the Office

I have spent a large chunk of my computing life in Microsoft Office.  As a teacher, I think it’s hard to avoid.  Tools like Word, PowerPoint and Excel form a sizable basis of the sorts of tools we use every day to create and present stuff to our kids.  I even have a few “qualifications” in Office, from a bunch of Brainbench certificates, to an International Computer Driving Licence, and even a few units from the Microsoft Office Specialist certification program.  I mean, if you’re going to spend a lot of time in these apps, you may as well know how to use them properly, right?

I recently had to create a few teaching resources using Microsoft Office 2007.  Office 07 is a fairly radical rethink of the interface for the Office suite.  The trouble with previous versions of Office is that they had so many features and tools that most users never found them.  Many were buried so deep in the interface that the average user simply never stumbled across them.  I even had an semi-heated discussion with a guy at a technology trade show once who was telling me that certain features would be really neat to have in Excel, and when I told him that everything he was wanting was already there, he argued back that I was wrong… these tools simply didn’t exist in Excel.  I showed him, he was amazed that he had overlooked them.  even though he considered himself a “power user”, he had never found some of these must-have features, some of which I thought were pretty obvious.  After I showed him they were there, he was a happy camper again.

So the goal in Office 07 was to bring as many of the available tools right out to the front of the interface.  That’s a big ask, since there are literally hundreds of tools and features in there, and while there will still be people who criticise the new interface for being too cluttered, too different to the previous versions, too whatever, I must say I think they’ve done a pretty good job of taming a rather big animal.  I found the new Office easy to learn (though I will confess to being a power user of Office software to start with) and the new Ribbon UI seemed pretty intuitive to me.  I’m really looking forward to see what they do with the Mac version…

The only thing about Office that is irksome is the price.  At around AUD$1150 for a full copy, it’s just way too overpriced, and it  is little wonder that piracy is such a huge problem in the home market.  Fortunately, there is a Student and Teacher edition (which is basically the same as the full version) that can be had for a few hundred dollars, and there is even a promotion happening at the moment over at It’s Not Cheating, where Australian university students can buy a copy for only $75.  Not a bad deal, and probably well worth it for a clear, piracy-free, conscience.  Makes you wonder about the sort of profit margins in the software though when you see these sorts of discounts being offered.  I guess Bill became the worlds richest person for a reason…

The other interesting development in the Office space is Google’s recent announcement to add a presentation module to the already existing word processor and spreadsheet modules in Google Docs.  Sure, it won’t have all the bells and whistles that MS Office has, but like I said, most users never use the more advanced features anyway.  For the majority of users, if they can type and format a document, calculate some numbers or keep a list in a spreadsheet, and do a basic presentation for an audience, that’s most of their computing needs right there.  Add in the Gmail and Google calendar features, and Google Docs is starting to look like an interesting proposition.  It also has two nice extra features… it can enable online collaboration on documents, and of course it is free.  Free is good.  Free is hard to beat.  At school, we just renewed our Microsoft licensing agreement for the year and it cost us about $18,000.  That’s every year.  As I say, free is good, and Google Docs is starting to look very attractive, especially now you can even brand it with your own domain name using Google Apps for your Domain.  I’m sure Open Office and some of the other open source office stuff is also worth a more serious look these days.

The downside of Google Docs of course is that it requires a user to be online all the time, with a fairly fast connection if it is to be at all usable.  But that’s becoming more the norm, and is probably not a big issue.  The flip side of that is that it makes all your documents available online, anywhere, anytime, which can certainly be a good thing in a Web 2.0 world.

For me, I will keep using Office for now because I do tend to regularly tap into many of its more advanced features.  But I can see a day in the not too distant future where even I might start to seriously rethink my attitude to the alternatives.

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Education, Innovation and Microsoft

DSC00120Not three words you normally find in the same sentence, but last week I had the opportunity to attend the Microsoft Education Roadshow in Sydney. It was part of the regular traveling circus that Microsoft puts on every so often to show off its commitment in the education space. I’ve been a number to these events before, but hadn’t committed to going to this one since they were usually little more than a sales wolf in educational sheeps clothing. But a few weeks prior to the event I had been asked by Intouch Consultancy if I would like to contribute some lesson plans based on the new Office 2007 applications, and those lessons would be released as part of the package of new educational content being shown at the roadshow. For that reason alone – I think it’s called ego – I decided to attend the event this year.

I’ve been a little critical of Microsoft in the past, and some of their events… you may have read my thoughts about the Vista release in Toronto last year. But I have to say, this year’s Roadshow in Sydney was really good. It makes such a difference when the speakers at an event like this are teachers, and can talk about stuff from the perspective of a teacher. I enjoyed listening to guy from the Maitland Catholic Education Office talk about their new Scholaris network deployment and how it solved a whole bunch of problems for them. I could relate to the issues he spoke about, since my school faces many of the same ones albeit on a much smaller scale. As the demos unfolded, I became more and more impressed at just how well thought through some of this new stuff is. The big problem in any school, and any network for that matter, is in getting disparate systems to talk to each other. Getting your school admin package to talk to your Active Directory server, and to talk to your payroll, your library software, your proxy server, your print management software, your timetable etc, is a pain. Getting all these systems to play nicely together is a major headache for any system admin. Yet, here was a guy showing us how they had solved all of these problems across a large number of different schools, all with slightly different configurations, all with a single sign on. I have to say I was pretty impressed… if you weren’t impressed by this, then you really didn’t understand the problem in the first place.

A guy from Intel got up to speak for a while, and it was sooooo obvious when a non-teacher addressed the crowd. the language changed from education to that of sales, and every sentence was full of corporate-speak. They really do need to keep these people away from the microphone at events like these. Seriously guys… if you invite a bunch of teachers along to an event, then keep the focus on education… we don’t care about the technical mumbo jumbo or the product specs or the projected sales figures for next quarter. That stuff is interesting to you, but not to us. Just focus on our needs and your bottom line will be just fine.

They had a guy from Microsoft show us a whole bunch of new stuff for education and I must say a lot of it looked really good. The new stuff you can do with Sharepoint was way cool, some great ideas and demos of software like Flight Simulator and Photostory, and a look at some of the new tools still in beta – in particular one for developing learning object-like apps (It’s name escapes me right now, but it looked very interesting) It looked to me like Microsoft was finally getting its act together in the education space. A final demo of Office 2007 and some new stuff for teachers by my buddy June Wall finished off the demos nicely. There was some cool stuff here too, although despite the oohs and ahhs from some of the audience at Vista’s eye candy effects, I still wouldn’t swap Vista for OSX!

I also got a chance to catch up with Margie Gardner, a teaching colleague that worked with me at Penshurst Marist. Margie took over my role when I left there and it sounds like she is doing a great job of keeping it all going. Margie and I had lunch sitting out on the steps of the Conference Centre, overlooking Darling Harbour on what was a beautiful Sydney day and had a chance to catch up on each others gossip.
Finally, back inside, we heard from the winners of the Microsoft Innovative Teachers Awards. Without intending to take anything away from these guys and girls who had been recognised as innovative teachers with technology, I have to say that it really doesn’t seem to take all that much to be “innovative”. I absolutely applaud what they have been doing with the projects and ideas that they have been applying in their classrooms, but I was stunned at how ordinary some of the “innovation” was. Margie nudged me during the demos and commented that we had been doing most of that stuff back at Penshurst more than eight years ago! I guess I just think that this sort of innovation should be seen as standard practice and not something out of the ordinary. Regardless, it was good to see people getting recognised for their work, and I hope it rubs off on some of the other teachers in the room, some of whom were perhaps seeing these ideas for collaboration and learning with technology for the first time

Before I left for the day I got to look around some of the vendor stands, had a play with the Wacom tablets, spoke to a few developers about Sharepoint, bumped into a few industry people I know and had a chat. Overall, it was a worthwhile day and I’m glad I went.

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Such a thing as a Free Lunch

Vista Launch Toronto Vista Launch Toronto Vista Launch Toronto Vista Launch Toronto

Dear Mr Gates,

Is it OK if I call you Bill? I feel like I know you so well, I’ve been using your company’s products for so many years now. I can’t say that I was there from the beginning, but I did start using Windows way back at version 3.0. (I’m told that’s probably a good thing, since Windows 1.0 and 2.0 were a bit of a joke apparently.) But since Windows 3.0 I’ve been right there with you man! I went through Windows 3.1, then WfW (remember that one? OMG, what were you thinking?)

Windows 95 came along at about the same time as my daughter was born, in fact the hospital where she was born gave away a free copy of Windows 95 to every child born that special August day when you went on stage to the sound of the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up”! My daughter was born a few days too early and I missed out (I’ve not forgiven her for that yet Bill) but hey, what a brilliant piece of marketing! And not at all tacky, like some people said it was!

Anyway since then, I’ve faithfully followed you and you loyal Microsofties through all the various versions of Windows – 98, 98SE, then ME, 2000, NT, XP, XPSP1, XPSP2 (to hell with those people who complain about the long times between releases… service packs count! Don’t they realise that fixing all those bugs and security holes takes a lot of work?)

But Bill… Oh Bill, what happened? I went to the launch of Vista today in Toronto, and I can’t believe it’s finally all over between us! I kept hearing the word “innovation” but where was it hiding? I kept hearing your people – our people, Bill – talking about this new Vista operating system and how it would revolutionise my corporate computing experience, and how it would make it so much easier to meet organisational goals and to collaborate across the enterprise. But Bill, I don’t want to do that stuff. I just want a computer that makes my life easier! I don’t care about being 37% more efficient when I send updated figures to Steve in Marketing, or sharing a PowerPoint deck with Jane in HR. I hardly ever need to reschedule a product planning meeting with people in the Boston office… Have you forgotten about me Bill? I don’t care about all that stuff… I’m an educator Bill! I just want a tool that can let me and my students manage our digital lifestyle. But based on what I saw today, it seems Vista is aimed at nothing but the corporate market. There was barely a mention of the education sector unless you include that dill from the Toronto District School Board, but really Bill, he was just embarrassing! You gotta screen these people Bill!

There used to be a time when you understood my needs Bill. You used to know what I wanted and how an operating system would make my life easier. Oh sure, there were plenty of times I’d curse Windows because it crashed and froze on me, but I stuck with it because, well, frankly, I had no option. But Bill, you need to understand that I now have options. Vista is not the only kid on the block, and to be honest, there are other kids on the block that can already do most of what Vista is talking about. Oh sure, they might be called Widgets instead of Gadgets, and Dashboard instead of Sidebar. And although I have to admit that Flip3D thing does look kind of funky, even compared to Expose, do I really need to put up with all the viruses and stuff just to get that?

But Bill, I have to say, I was disappointed with the demos. That poor guy doing the voicemail demo… I felt so sorry for him. He tried and tried and tried to make it work, and it must have been so embarrassing to have it fail in front of so many people, and I don’t blame him for giving up eventually, but it didn’t make Microsoft look good Bill. I saw a few other demos while I was there and several of them ended with the presenters getting so frustrated that things weren’t working and they gave up as well. It’s tough to watch a demo that has to be abandoned Bill… it makes it look like the product is either too hard to use or still a bit buggy. And after spending so long in development, it must break your heart to see Vista behaving badly in public like that. Luckily, the presenters explained what was supposed to happen, so even though it never worked right,at least I have an idea of what was supposed to happen. That was much more reassuring.

Oh, but Bill, I have a piece of advice… When you get your people to present their case studies about your products, you need to create some compelling examples. I can’t believe that one of the case studies talked about a company who moved to Exchange 2007 because they wanted to move away from their aging Novell mail system. Come on Bill! At least give us some good examples of why we should give Microsoft even more money to upgrade our current systems! Of course an aging Novell system is due for an upgrade, but what about the party faithful Bill? What about all those of us who run Exchange 2000 or 2003? What’s in it for us? Or do we wait until our Exchange 2003 server is as old as the Novell server, and simply upgrade to Exchange 2014?

Overall, I have to say I was disappointed. I thought the release lacked pizzazz Bill. It was flat. It lacked sparkle. Even the exhibitors out in the Microsoft Partner displays looked half asleep, and it was a bit embarrassing to see so many of them still using Windows XP. This is a Vista launch, Bill! Surely the partners should all be using Vista by now! You gotta get tough with these people and force them to upgrade! Just pretend they are Microsoft customers and take away their other options… they’ll soon upgrade then!

But yeah, you gotta liven up the next major product launch, get some sparkle happening, maybe even a little charisma or charm. Maybe you could talk Steve Jobs into doing a favour for you, he’s always pretty charismatic on stage, and he seems to be doing a bang-up job promoting Apple at the moment… He’d be good, although he may be a little too busy getting ready for Leopard to help you out right now. Actually, forget about Steve Jobs. You’re probably still mad at him for not telling you what’s going to be in Leopard. How are you supposed to make Vista better than Leopard if he won’t tell you what’s in it? That was so uncharitable of him! Maybe after Leopard comes out you can release Vista Service Pack 1 and bring Vista up to speed again. It’s a good thing that Apple has such a small market share or more people might figure out where all the cool stuff in Vista came from!

I have to apologise and say that I can’t see myself buying Vista right now, but I’m hoping that it will improve over time. Let’s face it, Version 1.o of anything from Microsoft is always just a stopgap right? I’m sure people understand that, and they know that you guys eventually work it out… usually by Version 3 or so. That’s just the way this business works.

I guess you’ll do the same thing with the Zune huh? Once there are some decent songs in the Zune marketplace, and we drop the silly “podcast” word in favour of something more palatable so you can include podcasts on the Zune, I think sales will really take off. No sense in promoting the iPod is there? Maybe they should be called “Zunecasts”? Yes I think that’s much better. Hmmm, now I think about it, I’m surprised I never saw the Zune there today. But then, I guess the launch wasn’t about all that silly digital media stuff, it was about business wasn’t it?

Anyway Bill, I just wanted to say thanks… it’s always good to go to a Microsoft product launch… And people say there’s no such thing as a free lunch!

Chris